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Location, Location, Location

I'm not selling real estate here, but do you know the importance of the
location of the computer room in your facility? Other than what goes into the
computer room, knowing where to put the computer room in your new
facility is the most important decision you'll make with your entire moving
project.

I'll describe the scenario for the accounting firm I was moving a few
months ago. A team of architects and interior designers drafted what they
thought to be an outstanding floor plan for our new space. We have a large
rectangular floor, approximately 600 feet long by 150 feet wide. To my
amazementand as a sign of their ignorancethey put the computer room
on the far west end (out of the way of other office functions). Why
wouldn't that work? The simple answer is network cable distance
limitations. Category 5 (CAT5) and CAT6 cabling are rated to support a
specified bandwidth at approximately 300 feet (100 meters). With the computer
room at one end of the building, half of that building full of computers would
either not get a network signal at all (no login ability), or would be
significantly weaker than full speed.

What speeds are we talking about? We chose CAT6 cabling, which is rated at
350 MHz. This is sufficient to support Gigabit (1000MB) to the desktop. We
currently only implement 100MB. When the time comes to upgrade, however, all
we'll need to do is update the network interface cards in the PCs and
update the network switch blades in the computer room.

I studied the proposed floor plan carefully, and worked with the architect to
move the computer room to the center of the building. We placed it off the
central hallway, allowing us to pass all of the distance tests conducted by our
cabling vendor, who certified the cable plant for CAT6 with the extended 25-year
warranty.

Certainly, there are other alternatives to a centralized computer room. Our
company is small enough to get by with a single wiring closet to "home
run" every cable run to a centralized cabinet. Larger companies and
companies with multiple floors need to implement routers and bridges to send the
network signals through the cable over longer distances.